CBD 2026: Reclaiming Presence and Ethical Grounding in Challenging Times with Diana Winston

Discover and experience ways that mindfulness offers us a beacon of hope in challenging times. During this lecture we’ll explore fundamental mindfulness principles that can help us navigate the complexities of our changing and often distressing political and social landscape. We’ll look at the time-tested ethical frameworks foundational to traditional mindfulness that sometimes are under-emphasized in current modern-day secular mindfulness settings. The session will illuminate how ethics equip us to critique, effectively navigate, and potentially transform contemporary social problems. Integrated into this session will be information about how mindfulness can support us to access fundamental well-being regardless of external circumstances.

This keynote is part one of a two-part series with Diana Winston in the Contemplation By Design Summit.

To extend the knowledge and skills you develop during this keynote lecture, please consider attending Diana Winston's iPause Guided practice titled Envisioning a Positive Future on Thursday, Oct. 22, 7:30-8:15am.

You are welcome to join one or both of Diana's Summit sessions.

Diana Winston is the Director of UCLA Mindful, the mindfulness education center of UCLA Health and is the author of The Little Book of Being, Fully Present, and other books. Called by the LA Times “one of the nation’s best-known teachers of mindfulness,” her work is mentioned in the New York Times, NPR, LA Times, and Bloomberg, among others. Diana has taught mindfulness since 1993 in medical settings, universities, businesses, nonprofits, and schools in the US and Asia and she has trained over 500 mindfulness facilitators worldwide. She can be found on the UCLA Mindful, Waking Up, and Happier Apps and at www.uclahealth.org/uclamindful

This session is part of the FREE Contemplation by Design Summit, Oct. 14-25, 2026.

The full summit schedule for this year will be posted at: https://med.stanford.edu/contemplation/summit.html.